Have you considered the possibility that other people have an inner life that is as deep as your own

documentation?

Correction: maintenance of an indie 2D RPG game that had existed for a few decades already.

> That makes a lot of sense in a world where we’re importing all our software from strangers. It makes less sense in the world we’re heading to, where most of the software we’re carving up fiefdoms for has the same provenance.

If I'm running software written by an LLM, even if I was the one who prompted the LLM, I would still want my OS to treat it as if written by a stranger.

I know he's not necessarily talking about relaxing security models here, but he's not being very specific about his vision otherwise.

I think OP may be onto something real, while you are definitely right if we translate concepts directly. But maybe the challenge, with current platforms included, is because we try to cram identities by reference. If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve. To tone down crankiness, I refer to identity in the technical sense, not personality etc. This doesn’t solve the challenge but it might point to a different foundation for a security model.

If the phone injures or defrauds you, does it have to make restitution? If so, how?

'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.

Ownership does not imply co-identity. If my phone harms someone else, without me being responsible but e.g. the brand that updated its firmware? Your questions are good, and I don’t have the answers. I just think our current model doesn’t either.

> If a phone had its own identity, with which you transact as with any party then lots of the security concerns would dissolve.

I feel like a lot of new security concerns would be created.

Indeed. Some would go, some would come.

I mean, everything should eh sandboxed imo. Even OS included software.

Problem with sandboxes is that it doesn't solve the "user who doesn't know or care" problem.

If you have to give access to particular files to an app, your average user will just give access to all. Someone installing tiktok doesn't look at the permissions...

The best thing would be for apps to operate on their own copy of a file regardless. But that doesn't stop bad apps from leaking importsnt files. Unless files can be signed as being for x thing requiring y special permissions as granted by the originator and not the user.

The crowd on here we can't to be able to truly own our devices. But I think for the safety of the average person they should be locked down by default, same as dev mode on android devices where you accept liability for doing silly things.

The right basic idea is, the UI for "do X to Y" must combine designating which Y you want and giving permission to access that Y (and no other). It's when the OS shell separates these aspects that you have to choose between extra annoying useless permission pop-ups and any security boundaries.

(Yes reworking our all our systems in terms of capability security is a giant job. But there's a difference between a giant job and )

Nope. There has never been a "good" post written in this genre ("I'm leaving my last team, here's my new project") and I'm not going to waste interesting bits on my pro-forma transition post.

I didn't submit this! Happy to chat about it, but I feel like I was pretty clear in the post that I wasn't bidding for the front page.

I think you got your comment replies mixed up? I don't see the relevance of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851040) to that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850998).

Sorry, I'm responding to the (apt) complaint that there aren't a lot of details in the post. They're right, and I'm just adding why.

The fault is mine. I commented before reading TFA, and couldn't fathom from the title that it would be a "pro-forma transition post".

What are the "simulated answers" for the public figures based on? They don't seem to be direct quotes, so I assume they're AI-generated in their voice from the sources? I'd make that more clear since you risk misrepresenting people's opinions.

all of the pages include the public sources they're based on and a clear disclaimer. this is also spelled out in the methodology section. many of these folks are using direct quotes to answer the questions where available as well

that being said, i agree, the simulated personas could be better flagged

appreciate the feedback

I doubt that's true

  > Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day...

That makes it even worse -- spending that much time with AI should make it glaringly obvious how valuable it is.

Not everyone has had such a positive experience... And anyway, whatever value AI provides doesn't put it beyond criticism.

I loved Scratch as a kid and got really deep into it. Not sure if I could call myself a "success story" but it did get me much more comfortable with programming!

Before Scratch I think the two biggest barriers in my childhood programming experiments were 1) Remembering all the different syntax and function names, and 2) Being bored by the basic CLI programs that all tutorials started with. Scratch helped with both of those. It had a palette with all possible commands available to you, it was impossible to make syntax errors, and it was visually-oriented so I could dive right into making games. Lowering those barriers helped me learn how to structure code in a fun way, so when I did eventually go back to the "real" languages I felt much less lost.

I also remember really loving the social features, getting comments on my work, and collaborating with people.

I'd love to see more experimentation in this area, there's definitely potential for a more modernized educational language that builds on these ideas.

If it can't find an LSP binary, Eglot will prompt you to pick one, and tell you which one it was looking for. That seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't want Emacs to download and install random binaries on my system automatically.

Should they install make for you too (default command for compilation-mode) or the various sql client (for the sql-mode) pr a lisp runtime (for the repl)?

There's a lot of very strong claims made at the start of this article.

(emphasis mine)

> A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge.

> In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries.

> Likewise, the LLM could recognize the face of almost any person, and it could generate any possible human face,

All writings? All of human knowledge in general? Any person??

The example he gives for writing is Shakespeare, which might be one of the most overrepresented writers in the entire training dataset. So yes, of course LLMs can replicate his writings with high accuracy. That doesn't mean that the same applies to literally all of human writings and knowledge.

> We've never had a system to integrate everything we know and everything we can imagine.

Yeah, we still don't.

At first I thought he was just being intentionally hyperbolic for effect, but the rest of the article is even worse. From the closing paragraph:

> We’ll soon depend on this oracle to such an extent that we’ll wonder how we lived without it.

No! AI is not an oracle! That is honestly an extremely dangerous way to think about this technology.

This is the type of baseless hype that OpenAI and Anthropic have been exploiting for years, and I really wish it would stop.

Tbh a trivial generative image model could generate any human face, because it could generate any image, just randomly generating pixels is enough.

Can you provide reasons other than "he's wrong"? There is no other technology that compresses so my knowledge into such a small space. A 24 GB diffusion model can generate a good approximation of any human relevant image from a description. Ask it to generate an image of the Tivoli fountain and it will do an impressive job. You can't use it as a map, but it gives an excellent representation.

Finally I don't think there are "dangerous ways" to think of any technology. This is just another tool.

If all that the author was saying was "LLM weights are highly compressed encodings of knowledge", I wouldn't have any complaints. He is making much bolder claims than that.

And if he was describing LLMs as "just another tool", I wouldn't be complaining either.

The onus is not on the commenter. The author made badly qualified statements. Thinking of anything as an oracle is dangerous, an “oracle” is not just another “tool” it’s a religion